19 December 2018

What creative writing course do YOU think CBC should run?

by Anna Davis
Course News, Events

As 2018 draws to a close, the CBC team is thinking hard about what Curtis Brown Creative will do in 2019 – and particularly about what our next new online creative writing courses should be … We’re definitely going to launch a brand new course in 2019, and we’d be really interested to hear from our writing community – by which I mean prospective students, former students, social media followers, mailing list subscribers – anyone, actually, who writes or draws and who reads our blog from time to time, or occasionally interacts with us. What sort of course would YOU like us to produce and run next?

All the courses I’ve just mentioned started out with the objective of guiding and supporting the student to reach a very specific creative objective. In each case we then developed this as a step-by-step journey, with a series of modules opening one per week. All our short online courses are centred on a substantial body of original, practical teaching material: For each of the three novel-writing courses mentioned above, I wrote the material myself (there’s a total of over 75,000 words of teaching material in total across those three novel-writing courses, plus resources and lots of tasks …) – and in the case of the picture book courses, I commissioned Sarah McIntyre and David O’Connell to write the teaching material, and then I worked with them as editor (that was really fun!). The course material is then presented to camera and edited into teaching videos, as well as being delivered in notes. The courses run on our online platform, where students can also share work and take part in discussions. We’ve tweaked the courses somewhat since first launch, and these days all the courses also feature experienced editors who offer some feedback to students (differing a little from course to course). That’s the overview – the shape of our shorter online creative courses. Now we want to make and launch a brand new one!

So what we’d like to ask you – whether you’ve taken our existing courses already or not, is: What online course are you looking for to help you with your creative work? Perhaps it’s a course that you feel isn’t available already when you browse the web – or maybe other providers do something similar but you still feel there’s scope for Curtis Brown Creative to bring something extra to the subject? What’s the course that would tempt you in?

We’re not after lots of detail – we basically just want to know what kind of course would be helpful to you. It could be a new novel-writing course with a different focus from those we already offer – it could be dealing with another writing form altogether, or perhaps a wholly different creative discipline.

So, for example, you could tell us, “I’d like a course in how to write a crime novel”, or “I want a course in writing a memoir”, or “I’d love you to do something on poetry”.

We can’t act on every suggestion, obviously, but we’ll consider everything carefully – for 2019 and beyond. If we develop a course in response to your suggestion, we’ll offer you a free place on it (or, in the event of lots of people making the same suggestion, one person will get a free place and the others will get a discounted place).

What would you like to sign up for with Curtis Brown Creative? Make your suggestion in an email, to CBCoffice@curtisbrown.co.uk, with NEW COURSE as the subject, by 8th January. We’re waiting to hear from you …